Under our first president, the value of the Second Amendment was tested when George Washington faced the possibility of confronting armed citizens of the United States. During Washington’s first term, a federal excise (commodities) tax became necessary just to run the federal government and fight Indian depredations. Congress placed the fully constitutional tax on distilled...
Contrary to the claims of Marxism, economics does not determine the political structure of a country; rather, the political structure of a country determines its economic system. The Soviet Union was proof of that. In the case of the U.S. government, this can be seen in the adoption of tariffs, beginning in 1789. The tariffs...
Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless. It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...
Life is short. Although I am a devoted, if amateur, student of Hollywood’s treatment of the great American War of 1861-65, I intended to spare myself the ordeal of Spielberg’s Lincoln. However, the honored editor of America’s bravest and best journal instructed me to go. I have always found such instruction to be wise. And...
There’s no way a man can sidestep trouble writing about the prospect of women as combat troops. You know, mowing the enemy down with machine guns; blowing up things, not to mention people; cutting, slicing, jabbing, stabbing, whatever it takes. For such is war, the elements little different in a high-tech age from those prevalent...
David Frost is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the Atlantic ocean. When he’s at home in England, Sir David, as he’s known, fronts daytime-television panels and gives splendid summer parties at the country home he shares with his wife, Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard. For many years, he also hosted a Sunday-morning interview hour in which,...
In the 2012 election, same-sex marriage made gains at the ballot box for the first time—however narrowly—in all four states where “marriage equality” was presented to the voters for decision. Have the American people been successfully fooled? Maybe the more germane question is, Are large numbers of the American people self-deceived about homosexuality? We must...
When George McGovern died, aged 90, two weeks before the last general election, the obituaries rightly praised his long and fitfully distinguished record as a U.S. representative and senator, his years of military service, his plucky presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, and his principled opposition to the Vietnam War, among other such causes. Unlike the...
Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature suddenly changed in the year 1912. Such things tend to be at the whim of later generations of critics, but there’s no doubt that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years just before the outbreak of World War I. ...
Probably the first thing that ought to be said about the quintessentially flamboyant, hard-drinking, and doomed British author Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) is that he could really write. Anyone familiar with the genre will know that there’s a long if not always proud tradition of debauched-looking men in black capes loitering around London pubs, a cigarette...
Barcelona is one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, and Barcelona’s most noted architect is Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. It is worth visiting Catalonia and the cities of Barcelona and Reus just to see Gaudí’s work. Eager visitors head for his masterpiece, Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Holy Family), which the...
Commencement speech to the Class of 2012, Veritas Preparatory Academy, Phoenix, Arizona Thank you for allowing me a few moments to address these graduates. I am truly honored. This is an impressive group of young people, so much so that I must admit I am especially grateful to be speaking before the valedictorians, and not...
It was sort of like being caught in a raging stream, and swimming hard against the current, inch by inch, to reach safety. The time was many years ago, when, as a college freshman, I fell into the currents of liberalism. And they were powerful. Just go with the flow, and you could get approval,...
My title, borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney, is deliberately misleading; that is, it does not mean here what he intended when he used it for his posthumous work (1595), known in another edition as The Apologie for Poetrie. In the past, poetry needed no defense—if that means pleas to a hostile or indifferent audience. Sidney,...
Whether it ends with a whimper or a bang, the American Empire is ending. WikiLeaks shows that the empire can no longer control the dissemination of information. Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen show it can no longer militarily defeat insurgencies. Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and even Bolivia show it can no longer dictate the foreign...
Oh, I’m a good old Rebel, That’s just what I am. And for this damned Republic, I do not give a damn! I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon, For anything I done! —Maj. James Randolph, CSA Not long ago, Texas Gov. Rick Perry...
Leftists love to obsess about hate. It seems to be on their tongues all the time, and it may have already surpassed racist as their expletive of choice to hurl at conservatives, traditionalists, Middle Americans, and other folks they detest. You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand the meaning of projection—that, when people...
“A tremendous victory for property rights”—that’s how the Castle Coalition described voter approval of Initiative 31, which placed limitations on the power of eminent domain in Mississippi. The November 8, 2011, results made Mississippi the 44th state to modify the power of eminent domain in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v....
U.S. President Barack Obama has “Reset” Washington’s relationship with Moscow, seeking to ease Kremlin concerns about Eastern Europe missile defense in exchange for continued U.S. access to Afghanistan over Russian territory. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, at her 2009 nomination hearing, paid lip service to working together with the Russian Federation “on vital security...
Within the Detroit metropolitan area, a short drive from gutted buildings and abandoned neighborhoods, one can step into a pre-industrial America, complete with working farms, horse-drawn carriages, and the charming homes of a now-vanished elite. Late in life, Henry Ford carefully refabricated the rural America he had helped to destroy in a place called Greenfield...
Two years ago, in one of the history seminars I offer to homeschoolers, I remarked on Robert E. Lee’s convictions regarding duty. We had just finished reviewing his life—his youth spent as acting head of his small household, his years at West Point both as a cadet and as superintendent, his heroism in the war...
Thornton Wilder met Sigmund Freud in the fall of 1935. Freud had read Wilder’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination. “‘No seeker after God,’” writes Wilder’s biographer (quoting Freud of himself), “he threw it across the room.” At a later meeting Freud apologized. He objected to Wilder’s “making religion a theme for amusement.” “Why should you...
On the evening of September 7, 1919, 60-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sat down in a darkened room in Portsmouth, England, to speak with his son Kingsley, who had died in the Spanish-influenza epidemic ten months earlier. “We had strong phenomena from the start,” Conan Doyle later wrote to his friend and fellow occultist Oliver Lodge:...
“If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it.” —Maurice Baring “Who is John Galt?” again rings throughout the land. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s doorstop novel chronicling a general strike of the productive against the “looters,” gains resonance during times of...
Sometimes a great book and the place in which it was read combine to cast a spell so potent and so enduring that both book and place become forever entwined in the memory of the reader. Whenever I see a copy of War and Peace, I think not only of Pierre and Natasha but of...
So, at this big funeral the other day for a local real-estate executive, the congregation is preparing to sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Great old hymn, yes? Glad expectations arise. That is, until the second verse: “Christians, we are treading where the saints have trod.” Wait now—didn’t it used to be “Brothers”? Sure did. A lot...
In the early years of the current century, confident predictions about the inevitable rise of Europe to a position of world power and influence filled the air over the Atlantic. The recent travails of the European Union have undermined that confidence. The apparent and impending economic collapse of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and...
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” —Louis Auchincloss, interview with Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times, September 21, 2007 In January (one year after his death at the age of 92),...
The first paragraph of the first chapter of John Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990) concludes, “A conservative will profess a preference for and a trust in Ronald Reagan; a reactionary will not, and not because Reagan was a Hollywood actor but because he never stopped being one.” The reactionary in me agrees with...
You would have thought that, at 17 percent of the U.S. economy, the healthcare industry would be much better understood than it apparently is by our Washington brethren. I can’t help but look back and smile at the image of Nancy Pelosi standing at a podium and opining on how she couldn’t wait to get...
It has been about five years since the young, mostly Berber proletariat of the dingy Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles suburbs took to burning its proletarian neighbors’ cars, and there is a looming feeling among French Catholics that something is still not quite right in the woods. There are indications that both French- and Church-government officials...
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
During Pope Benedict’s 2010 visit to Britain, the English philosopher Roger Scruton provided an apt description of the country’s true religion: The official culture, represented by the BBC, the TV chat shows and the opinion pages of the quality press, is neither Christian nor English, but “multicultural”—and even Pope Benedict ended his visit with praise...
There he was, Abraham Lincoln in a Confederate Army cap, staring out of the page of an old Courier-Journal. I had been looking for something else when I happened upon this collateral descendant of the 16th president, photographed in front of the obelisk that is the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, as he honored...
To date, Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult novels about a teenage girl (Bella Swan) and her vampire boyfriend (Edward Cullen) have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie versions are still coming. When a phenomenon is of this scale it doesn’t matter what a book is, artistically; you have to take such a cultural...
As I write, the lame-duck Congress is revving up for one last chance to do really lasting damage to the country, in the form of the cloyingly titled DREAM Act, which would grant an open-ended amnesty to illegal aliens who were brought here as children by their parents. As Roy Beck of NumbersUSA warns, this...
The cynical elites of Ancient Rome, said Edward Gibbon, found the religions of the empire equally false and equally useful. The leftist/corporate elites of our time also agree that religion is false, so much so that they can barely contain their contempt for it. As Barack Obama opined, it’s just something that Middle American losers...
Of all the Republican successes in the midterm elections, perhaps none has the potential to be as consequential as the elevation of Rand Paul to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. Paul was the biggest and most genuine Tea Party triumph in November. As the son and ideological heir of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), he...
A mortgage crisis still haunts the country like a credit collector calling you daily about your unpaid Visa bill. It’s harder to get a mortgage than it has been in the memory of anyone living. The banks “only accept the best credit now for a loan,” a mortgage broker told me. She enjoyed the business...
Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev has recently warned Europeans of the dangers of building a completely atheist and secularized society. That was the situation in Eastern Europe under communism. Some of the methods may have been different, but the outcome is the same: the notion of God is expelled from society, religion is confined to the...
On October 8, Americans awoke to government reports that the domestic economy had shed another 95,000 jobs in September. Despite the billions of dollars mailed to select citizens in the form of stimulus checks and the politicized bailouts of protected industries, U.S. policymakers have failed to resuscitate the moribund economy or coax unemployment down from...
It was another day, you know—back when President James A. Garfield could define a university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” Which was to say, a great teacher—Hopkins being the renowned president of Williams College—needed only the opportunity to sit down, unencumbered, and teach. You know,...
This is the second part of a speech on poet Alan Sullivan that Timothy Murphy has delivered to Catholic and Protestant congregations on the High Plains. (The first part appeared in the October issue.) Mr. Sullivan, a frequent contributor to Chronicles, died on July 9, right after finishing his last work of translating David into...
Like the mindless day traders of the 1990’s who piled into the same hot internet stocks, today’s commentators on the causes of 2008’s residential-real-estate implosion have exhibited a similar obtuseness regarding the workings of financial markets. One will search in vain for any article that identifies a party other than Wall Street or large commercial...
“A crocodile has been worshipped, and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by a crocodile.” —John Taylor of Caroline “The Father of Waters now flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln famously announced in July 1863. He was, according to a reporter, uncharacteristically “wearing a smile...
This is the first part of a speech Timothy Murphy has delivered to Catholic and Protestant congregations on the High Plains. The second part will appear in a subsequent issue. Alan Sullivan, a frequent contributor to Chronicles, died on July 9, right after finishing his last work of translating David into meter, and we shall...
Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror! All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics gives the past a certain golden glow. You know what I’m talking about if you recall...
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES On Writ of Certiorari to the Court of Appeals June 21, 2017 Justice Breyer delivered the Opinion of the Court. Sheila X is a single woman living in San Diego. Shortly after giving birth to a child, she received her Law School Admission Test scores. ...
Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, the United States dropped the first offensive nuclear weapon in history. This bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” killed around 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. The U.S. military dropped the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war, “Fat Man,” three days later on nearby Nagasaki, killing approximately 39,000 people....
The Cabinet Office in London’s Whitehall is not generally a hotbed of tourist activity. The building’s squat, granite façade is screened from public view by a somehow incongruously lush row of elm trees, and, within, it’s a warren of nondescript, government-furnished cubicles typically inhabited by middle-aged men in suits writing memos to one another. For...